1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to information retrieval in a computer network. More particularly, the invention relates to a method and computer program product for dynamically serving a given web-page element (e.g., an advertisement) based on a location of the requesting client device.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World Wide Web is the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system. In the Web environment, client machines effect transactions to Web servers using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is a known application protocol providing users access to files (e.g., text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides basic document formatting and allows the developer to specify “links” to other servers and files. In the Internet paradigm, a network path to a server is identified by a so-called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) having a special syntax for defining a network connection. Use of an HTML-compatible browser (e.g., Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) at a client machine involves specification of a link via the URL. In response, the client makes a request to the server identified in the link and, in return, receives in return a document or other object formatted according to HTML. A collection of documents supported on a Web server is sometimes referred to as a Web site.
In the past, client machines were typically desktop or laptop computers. Recently, the computer industry has sought to add computer processing and communications capabilities to devices other than what would normally be considered a traditional computer. Such devices are quite varied and include, for example, personal digital assistants (PDAs), business organizers (e.g., IBM® WorkPad®, the 3Com® PalmPilot®, and the like), smartphones, cellular phones, desktop screen phones, in-vehicle devices, other handheld devices, and the like. For convenience, these devices, as a class, are sometimes referred to as “pervasive computing” clients as they are devices that are designed to be connected to servers in a computer network and used for computing purposes regardless of their location.
With client devices becoming more portable, there have also been attempts to customize web content to a particular user's location. One such technique is described in IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 41 No. 1, January 1998, titled “Method for Using Global Position System to Find Close Services.” In this disclosure, a laptop computer having a Global Position System (GPS) creates a “cookie” with longitude and latitude information. This cookie can be extracted by a search engine when the user enters a search request to allow searches to be performed based on the laptop's location. In particular, the search engine's database contains longitude and latitude information for each business, and the search engine includes a routine that calculates the distance between longitude and latitude pairs. In use, the user navigates to the search engine and fills in a form identifying a type of business (e.g., restaurant, theatre, etc.) to be located and the distance he or she is willing to travel to that business. The user submits this page to the search engine, which extracts the cookie having the laptop position information. For each service found in the database, the distance routine is used to identify those services that are “close” enough to the user's location. These search results are then returned to the user.
While the technique described above is advantageous, it is limited to search engine content. Thus, the user merely receives a list of targeted URLs or links that must then be evaluated. In the web environment, however, there are many different types of page content other than links. To give just one example, most commercial web site pages include advertising in the form of banners or the like. While it is known in the prior art to serve a given banner advertisement as a function of either the user's past browsing activities or keywords entered into a search engine, the targeted serving of such content based on client device location has not been attempted. Advertising would be much more effective if the construction of the page returned to the user by the web server were done with knowledge of the user's location. Benefits to sellers of advertising would include the ability to sell targeted advertising capability to businesses that provide physical services like plumbing, landscaping, medical care and the like, which are of most interest only to potential customers in fairly close proximity to their businesses, even though the site these customers may be browsing might be anywhere on the Internet.
It would be desirable to provide a mechanism that serves dynamic web page content based on the current position of the client device. This invention solves this problem.